I'll Be Gone in the Dark
Page 30
Orange County Sheriff’s Department
Golden State Killer victim Janelle Cruz in happier times, at the Bluff Lake YMCA camp (circa 1981).
Courtesy of Michelle White
Charlene and Lyman Smith, who were murdered on March 13, 1980, in their Ventura home.
Classmates.com
Debra Alexandria Manning, who was murdered alongside Robert Offerman in his Goleta condominium on December 30, 1979.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office / Orange County Sheriff’s Department
An undated photo of osteopathic surgeon Robert Offerman, who was shot to death on December 30, 1979.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office / Orange County Sheriff’s Department
Cheri Domingo and Gregory Sanchez, who were murdered by an intruder on July 27, 1981, in Goleta.
Courtesy of Debbi Domingo
Debbi Domingo, daughter of victim Cheri Domingo, had run away from home; she last talked to her mother by phone the day before her murder. Debbi’s final words to her were “Why don’t you just get the hell out of my life!”
Courtesy of Debbi Domingo
Crime-scene tape cordons off Toltec Way, the quiet Santa Barbara cul-de-sac where Cheri Domingo and Gregory Sanchez were murdered. Thirty years later, DNA from the crime scene connected the double homicide to the Golden State Killer.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office / Orange County Sheriff’s Department
Brian Maggiore and his wife, Katie, were shot to death by an unknown assailant while walking their dog in Rancho Cordova, on February 2, 1978. The crime is now suspected to have been perpetrated by the Golden State Killer.
Classmates.com
Investigators process the Rancho Cordova backyard where Brian and Katie Maggiore were found shot to death after attempting to flee their assailant.
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department / Orange County Sheriff’s Department
“Mad is the word.” A piece of paper torn from a spiral notebook found after a nearby East Area Rapist (EAR) attack. It was bundled with other materials discovered on a trail sniffed out by bloodhounds along a railroad right-of-way in Danville, California. The handwritten contents appear to be a journal entry in which the author vents about a disciplinarian sixth-grade teacher.
Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office
A hand-drawn map found with the “Mad is the word” journal entry. The area depicted is unclear, but Contra Costa criminalist Paul Holes believes the map exhibits the sophistication of someone who works in or around landscape architecture or development. On the flipside of the map are doodles, including the word “punishment,” intensely scrawled.
Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office
A shoe impression found by detectives investigating the October 1, 1979, attack in Goleta.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office / Orange County Sheriff’s Department
A sketch depicting a masked burglar, believed to have been the East Area Rapist, who was scared off by a light-sleeping Danville resident on July 5, 1979.
Tom Macris / Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office
A sketch of a prowler and would-be intruder, observed by a teenage girl as he attempted to enter her San Ramon house while she was home alone on August 8, 1979. The incident occurred fewer than eight hundred feet away from the scene of an earlier EAR attack. When he realized he’d been observed, the prowler fled into the same Christmas tree farm used as an escape route in that previous attack.
Tom Macris / Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office
A facial composite of the prowler suspected of shooting Douglas Moore* on February 16, 1977.
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department
A typical page from Sacramento County’s massive body of documentation on the East Area Rapist crimes.
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department
Newspaper clippings archived by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Although the possibility of a link between some of the crimes was considered at the time, the presence of a serial killer in the region largely went undetected.
Anaheim Bulletin / Orange County Sheriff’s Department; Orange County Register / Orange County Sheriff’s Department; Orange County Register / Los Angeles Times / Orange County Sheriff’s Department
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department organized an EAR–focused community meeting on November 8, 1977, at Mira Loma High School in Sacramento, where frightened residents voiced their concerns.
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department
Sergeant Larry Crompton of the EAR Task Force in Contra Costa County, pouring plaster to create a cast of a footwear impression.
Courtesy of Larry Crompton
Paul Holes, early in his career as a criminalist at the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office.
Courtesy of Paul Holes
Detective Richard Shelby, the original lead investigator in the EAR series, types a report at the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department.
Courtesy of Richard Shelby
Detective William McGowen, Visalia Police Department.
Courtesy of Mary Lou McGowen
Larry Pool, in a photo taken during his swearing-in as a Senior Investigator at the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office in August 2017.
Courtesy of Larry Pool
Michelle McNamara, conducting research for I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. Also on the couch, Michelle’s daughter, Alice, who is “double-checking” her mother’s work.
Courtesy of Patton Oswalt
Michelle McNamara hard at work in her preferred writing environment.
Courtesy of Patton Oswalt
About the Author
MICHELLE McNAMARA (1970–2016) was the author of the website True Crime Diary. She earned an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Minnesota and had sold television pilots to ABC and Fox and a screenplay to Paramount. She also worked as a consultant for Dateline NBC. She lived in Los Angeles and is survived by her husband, Patton Oswalt, and their daughter, Alice.
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Copyright
“Crime Club” reproduced from The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, edited by Donald Justice, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1975, 1962 by the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1960 by John A. Kees. Copyright 1954, 1947, 1943 by Weldon Kees.
Material covered in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was featured in the article “In the Footsteps of a Killer,” published by Los Angeles magazine.
I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK. Copyright © 2018 by Tell Me Productions. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Sarah Brody
Cover photographs © Ed Freeman/Getty Images (house); © Kues/Shutterstock (texture)
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-231980-7
Version 01042018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-231978-4
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* Pseudonym
† Never conclusively linked to the Golden State Killer.
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† Michelle’s understanding concerning the use of overkill in these cases had shifted somewhat after this was written. She had since reached the conclusion that only as much force as was necessary to kill was used in the GSK homicides. This information was gleaned from discussions with active investigators, including Paul Holes (who said he was “unimpressed” by the ferocity of the blows compared to other crime scenes he’s analyzed). The messy/dramatic presentation of a bludgeoning death could initially register as overkill, which is likely what happened in some of the GSK cases.
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* All Moore family names are pseudonyms.
* All Williams family names are pseudonyms.
† This was the only known EAR attack in the South Area. The dentist who co founded the EARS Patrol and offered the $10,000 reward—which had been well-publicized in the week leading up to the attack—had a practice less than half a mile away, which may or may not have been purely coincidental.
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† This case inspired California Proposition 69, approved in 2004, which mandated DNA collection from all felons, and from adults and juveniles charged with certain crimes (e.g., sex offenses, murder, arson). Keith Harrington’s brother Bruce sponsored the campaign, pledging nearly $2 million to fund it.
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† Forensic Genealogy, by Colleen Fitzpatrick, was published in 2005.
† The text from the directories and phone books was collected by using a software process known as optical character recognition, or OCR, to convert the image of the scanned material into text. Because it’s a digital eye reading analog material of variable print and scan quality, the output is lousy with syntax and transcription errors, ranging from failure to distinguish, say, the letter D from the letter O, to chaotic arrays of punctuation marks, symbols, and other errant nonalphanumeric characters. These issues necessitated hundreds of hours of cleanup in order to turn these scans of decades-old volumes into readable and consistently formatted lists of names.
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